Six months into a Scrum adoption, teams still need sign-off from a governance board before releasing, and every technical choice above a small threshold goes to an architecture forum. The teams inspect diligently in their Retrospectives but almost nothing they identify actually changes. A director asks the Scrum Master why. What is the most accurate explanation?
Professional Scrum Master I, objective 2. Developing people and teams hard
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The options
Not correct The teams are not inspecting deeply enough, so the Retrospective format should be changed
Wrong. The scenario says they inspect diligently. Reworking the event addresses the one part of the empirical loop that is already working.
Not correct The Scrum Master should escalate each blocked improvement to the governance board individually
Wrong, and it is tempting because it looks like removing impediments. Handling them one at a time leaves the structure that generates them intact, and makes the Scrum Master a permanent intermediary.
Correct Adaptation becomes difficult when the people involved are not empowered, so the organisation has to change how it structures and empowers the teams
Correct. The teams are inspecting and then finding they cannot act; that is a missing grant of authority, not a missing insight, and it is the organisation's part of the framework to supply.
Not correct The teams should adapt only within what the boards already permit, since self-management operates inside organisational constraints
Wrong, and it quietly redefines self-management as whatever is left over. Scrum expects the organisation to structure and empower the team to manage its own work, not the team to shrink to fit.
Why
Empiricism has three links and an organisation can break the last one without touching the first two. Teams that inspect but cannot adapt will keep producing accurate findings and no change, and the failure is not visible inside the team's own events. The remedy is the organisation's to supply, because Scrum Teams are structured and empowered by the organization to manage their own work. The Scrum Master's work here is with the organisation — leading, training and coaching its adoption, and removing the barriers — rather than with the Retrospective.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- Scrum Guide section Adaptation
- What it says
- Adaptation becomes more difficult when the people involved are not empowered or self-managing.
Practise this
Reading one question is not practice. The trainer will draw a set from objective 2 and space the ones you get wrong.
Practise Professional Scrum Master I
More questions on this objective
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